Google has been toying with changes to the Google Feed in its eponymous app all year, seemingly settling on a translucent look when you swipe right from your launcher home screen, or the three-tab interface in the full app. Google may still be testing different options, so yours may not be the same as mine, but I find it a lot worse than what I had before, especially as I can't swipe away cards to dismiss them anymore.

Another fairly recent introduction, in both views, are the shortcuts at the top of the feed (see above image). By default, four of them are on display: current weather, Eat & Drink, Translate, and Solitaire. That last one aside, the options may be useful to some people, but not to everyone, and although you can scroll right to view more shortcuts or click the arrow to see all of them, some might want the first four to be different. Until now we didn't think it was possible to edit the order. Apparently, it is.

You may have noticed the "sort of" at the end of the title, though, and that's because although you can edit the options, the method is a little half-baked. If you long press a shortcut icon it will turn blue and can be dragged to a "Remove" area at the bottom of the screen to get rid of it. It's similar to removing an app icon or widget from your launcher home screen. In place of the discarded shortcut, the list moves up and a new one slides into view. The issue here is that you can't select what you want to appear, you can only keep removing until one you actually find useful comes up.

So while you can edit the shortcuts, it's a laborious process, particularly as I don't find that many of them to be useful anyway. I actually got bored while trying to fill out the four slots with decent options and I'm now left with Metronome and Random Number. I won't use whatever I put there so there's barely any point in taking the time to change them. That's just me, though. Hopefully, someone out there will find this information useful.

Thanks to Jasonc07 and others in the comments, it seems that you can move options to the front just by tapping on them. This is obviously intended to put what you actually use to the front. This will speed up the process of rearranging them, too.

The personalized timely cards (traffic, packages incoming, parking location, etc.) are now hidden behind a small button on the upper right. I guess if you only used to care about the news then it's good for you otherwise it's now more difficult to swipe and click with one hand every time I want to check my more important cards that used to be on the top one swipe away, not even mentioning you can't dismiss news with a swipe anymore.

I can get news in several places unlike those personalized and useful cards, heck I even get automatic notification of relevant news without even having to look a feed...

I always like new except when it hinders important functionality without providing any options about it.

mike shwilly

Have the same thing. Reminders are pretty much useless with such design.

Swami

OT - Upvote for a fellow gooner!!

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DarrenSaw

They have over tinkered with this, the last version was excellent, this tabbed version is dreadful. No sir to dismiss on stories is very irritating.

Jasonc07

Instead of deleting what's not useful you can also tap on an option you like and it moves to be the second icon after the weather. This only seems to work if it is not already in your top 5.

Just use the ones you would like to see. It puts the recent ones in the list after weather. Delete one and the next most recently used shortcut slides over. It only took me a second to click on each shortcut that I wanted to see in the to bar.

My google Feed cards/theme still look like from over a year ago. I don't even have these shortcuts on my 6P in Germany

AussieB

Google's cards are getting annoying. I swipe left and there are a dozen cards on God knows what. None of them are useful. You can't even easily swipe them away. I think. I'm going to have to turn it off

Patruns

These cards drive me nuts. I used to get only the ones I want. Now I get everything. Turning off all notifications in the settings does absolutely nothing.

nxtiak

Good Feed is useless. Where is Google Now? Where's my package shipping tracker, where's the Map ETA to my doctor's appointment, etc... Argh most useful features are gone.
Wait, looks like I have to tap the little square icon with three lines above them. Ugh annnoying.

With the new feed, they made it much harder to do things that were simple tasks previously. If I want information on my daily route to school, I dont want to have to tap the box on the top right, I just want everything in one spot. I used to get package information without extra steps, but now I have to tap the box to open up the full app. Then when Im done with the app, I have to hit the multitasking button and swipe the app away.

SOMFW

Finally!
An article about Google that doesn't blatantly kiss Google ass,. Gushing like a teen school girl over some new useless half assed idea they are forcing on it's Guinea pigs (customers). usually in the hopes of getting free Google products or a job there.

The Google app and the feed are a total mess.
No swipe to remove cards! What genius approved this?
The same cards reappear constantly, no matter how many times you "hide them" or say not interested"
Theses same cards may appear days later too.
The sometimes useful cards about upcoming appointments, events etc, are buried at the bottom or on the hidden page or don't show up at all.
And yet Google refuses too listen to the utterly useless feedback system and the endless rants in their "help" forums . AKA their pathetic excuses for even the most rudimentary customer service.

But, day in and day out, there are articles gushing over their New "improvements" Such as new tween or twink approved Emojis, as if these people are scared to say anything negative about Google

Indianajonze

this is one of the worst ux updates they've ever had. nothing wrong with google now as it was. to have to jump through hoops to get your real info such as package tracking and appointments is ridiculous. also, i have ZERO INTEREST IN KIM KARDASHIAN, GOOGLE! stop filling this space with info on utter nonsense!

leganzish

I always assumed the ones set there were permanent, but I noticed this weekend that if I went to more shortcuts and chose a different one that it was now in that list. It seemed to keep the last 3 used in the 3 right-most spots on there. Maybe a little easier to edit than what the author is seeing, but might not stick if you use something else (I didn't mess with it much).

I think I have a little different layout than the author too, because I have a fixed weather shortcut in the 1 spot and the other 3 are the recently used.

11222

i just get random sh*t in my feed. i do a google search and the google app feeds me related links i don't want to see for about a month. i follow the phillies. several times a season google starts to feed me other teams. i have to click not interested. i'm worried if i add anything else, then i'll be clicking not interested half the time i go into the app.

MightierThanTheSword

This recent update really is a total car crash by the driverless Googleites (or whatever those crazy kids like to call themselves). What the hell were they thinking? It's like they've totally chosen to ignore all their own UX and UI rules. I'm actually looking at downloading the old version of the APK and switching off auto updates - it's such a dog's dinner. Why hide all the decent information and ram utter dog turd news stories down our necks. And removing swipe away news articles, dear God Google, for the love of humanity what were you thinking? Why make a really, genuinely useful app, bloody useless? This has to be the worse updates in the history of updates!